>>2535219>>CPB are primarily elderly boomers, most of whom are really social democrats, who believe that electoralism worksHorseshit. To quote from BRS,
>But the struggle to win economic and social reforms under capitalism not only improves conditions for the working class, for as long as those reforms are maintained. It also raises confidence, expectations and demands. Thus, political understanding can grow about the class nature of society, class rule and the need to fight to change them.BRS supports social democratic reforms insofar as they increase working class consciousness. The worker of the 1970s, who had seen governments fall due to strike actions, and enjoyed hard won social democratic measures of wealth redistribution, had far more class consciousness than the post Blair generation who saw little to no effective working class resistance to years of austerity. For the avoidance of doubt,
>Invariably, social democracy has ended up capitulating to monopoly capital, abandoning its most radical policies and turning on sections of its own supporters in an effort to stabilise, manage or modernise the capitalist economy.
>In every case, labour and socialist parties and governments in capitalist countries have had no effective theory and programme to guide them. Their outlook is not based on a Marxist, class-based understanding of how capitalism works and where and when it is most vulnerable. Consequently, social democracy has had no strategy for progressive advance and socialist revolution. If you have read BRS, it was done with a hateboner in which you were doing so only to validate your preconceived notions of what it contains and advocates. Allow me to summarise the strategy and reasoning:
>The Labour Party, while a bourgeois party which upholds Monopoly capitalism, contains an inherent flaw in that it is still, therotically, answerable to the TUC and affiliated unions. In our two party system, it is preferable to the Conservative party. If you take out idealist Christian ethics of sin, this isn't remotely controversial - a Labour Government puts the working class on a marginally better footing to advancing their interests, and this is as far as our support should go - one cross put on a piece of paper every 4-5 years. To equate this with support or complicity to the Labour Party is nothing more than bourgeois idealism.>While the TUC and unions are dominated by the right wing of the trade union movement, they remain de jure organisations of working class power, and with class concious leadership developed from the bottom up can apply pressure on a Labour government to enact the Left Wing Programme (LWP).>The LWP, in addition to introducing social democratic reforms which directly benefit the working class, more important attacks the structures of bourgeois state power and advances/ introduces organisational power for the working class. These begin with reversing the gains of the ruling class during the Thatcherite/Blairite post 1970s, and then advancing the gains of the working class far beyond those achieved in the post war settlement.>These gains are needed for the later stages of the revolutionary process during which the mechanisms for state Monopoly on violence must be confronted head in. In short, we have to move the pieces of the chessboard to be far more favouable before attacking head on.The CPB is a legal party and therefore cannot openly call for violent armed insurrection. Read the following section with this in mind,
>Experience also indicates that the British ruling class and its allies can be utterly ruthless in defending their interests, not only through the use of state power at home but also abroad through the use of economic sabotage, military force, anti-democratic subversion, military dictatorship, state torture and death squads.
>This underlines the need for a popular democratic anti-monopoly alliance to secure the greatest possible support for policies that challenge any aspect of state-monopoly capitalism. A left government in Britain will need to be rooted in mass extra-parliamentary campaigning and militancy if it is to survive and succeed.
>Electing a left government committed to the alternative economic and political strategy (AEPS) and its left-wing programme (LWP) will mark the transition of the revolutionary process to a second stage.
>This stage will be characterised by a combined parliamentary and extra- parliamentary struggle to implement major policies of the LWP. The left government will need to work closely with – and be held to account by – the labour movement and the other forces of the popular democratic anti- monopoly alliance, mobilising the maximum support inside and outside parliament.
>Every effort will have to be made to involve the labour and progressive movements, and new organisations formed in the course of mass action, in formulating policy, strategy and tactics and enforcing government measures based on the LWP.
>Because European Union fundamental treaties and institutions cannot be radically reformed without unanimous agreement between all member states, a left government in Britain would need to be free from all the neoliberal and anti-socialist provisions of the EU Single Market. It must be able to assert the principle of popular sovereignty in order to develop free and equal trading, commercial and political relations with other countries across the globe – including those in Europe – and to act in solidarity with oppressed peoples, promoting such values in the United Nations and other international bodies.
>The drive to implement the LWP will undoubtedly meet with resistance from powerful sections of the capitalist class and from within the state itself. The British ruling class will seek support from anti-socialist allies within Britain and abroad, in the world’s financial and currency markets, the boardrooms of transnational corporations, the institutions of the EU, the US government, NATO, the WTO and the IMF.
>The example of Chile demonstrates the willingness of the US and British ruling classes to destroy long-established parliamentary democracy in order to defend imperialist interests. In 1973, the elected Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by a military coup orchestrated by the US administration, carried out by Chilean generals and backed by US transnational corporations and Chilean landowners. Policies of progressive nationalisation were reversed by ‘made in the USA’ neoliberalism. British governments subsequently lent military, financial and trading assistance to that murderous dictatorship.
>The defeat in Chile confirmed the importance of limiting the opportunities for outside interference, understanding the difference between government office and state power, replacing reactionary personnel in top state positions, consolidating broad alliances (and curbing ultra-leftist adventurism), building a Communist Party able to exercise decisive influence and developing a military policy that relies upon the mass of the people.
>In Britain, the popular movement – with the organised working class at its core – and the left government would need to be organised and ready to counter and overcome all covert and overt counter-revolutionary activitiesCould we make it any more clear that electoral based efforts are just the beginning - quite explicitly, the first phase of socialist transition? And when you think about it, what alternative do we have? Armed insurrection in 2025 with the few thousand Marxist Leninists in the country - how many rifles and armoured cars do we have? How many able and trained bodies to operate them? Should we form an illegal party of a few hundred and begin a campaign of violent red terror? How long exactly would that work in a country as small as Britain facing the combined might of the Western surveillance system? Of course the [spoiler]first[/spoiler] stages of building working class power have to exist within the confines of our bourgeois constitution. To state otherwise is pure delusion.
You've clearly never been a member of the party if you genuinely think most members think electorialism works. It reflects neither our party line nor common attitudes of our cadre toward it. Although it is blindingly obvious that Britain in 2025 does not have the material conditions which allow a Leninist style capture of state power, the exact roadmap of how to achieve this - at first constitutionally - remains open for debate. BRS is regularly updated to reflect decisions taken at successive Congresses, and periods of feedback from Branches, Districts, and Nations.
BRS, at the bare minimum and most critical you can be, is at present *good enough*. Ideas are only important insofar as they lead to the correct actions. BRS as it stands requires the party to work towards building class consciousness in what shattered and fractured organs of working class power remain, primarily in trade unions and tenants unions. It dictates that we have to go to the working class as members of the working class and find out their complaints, and then provide political leadership based on Marxist theory in turning them into actionable goals and tactics to achieve them. And that's exactly what we should be doing as we seek the rebuild the class consciousness which has been shattered to the point of extinction in the past 50 years. Could we have a better line, could we be more correct in our analysis and medium to long term route to socialist revolution? Of course! Would that lead to us doing anything differently at present, when the working class remain on the defence from further reactionary measures? No!
I would answer your other criticisms but they could, in part, be true. There has never been a Communist Party which has been correct in all of their positions and analysis, and there never will be. The CPB is worth joining as from day one you will be expected and supported to organise politically among the working class on the basis of a political platform agreed through DemCem: something which sets it apart from the CPGB-ML or RCP. A vanguard party isn't the result of having the right ideas, but rather a historical phenomenon resulting from grassroots political activity and internal struggle. It's easy to sit on your armchair on the basis that nobody represents your enlightened understanding of Marxist-Leninism, but if you were to join the CPB you would find that every member too has reservations with our current line and practice - we are not dogmatists, and democratic centralism requires that, in the appropriate fashion, we routinely engage in collective self criticism. The difference is we have the strength to work in spite of these differences: in one word, discipline.
Do you think it will become easier to belong in a Communist Party after they seize power and their decisions directly impact the lives of millions of people? If you don't have the discipline to say, belong to a Communist Party which has a position of Israel (over which they have zero bearing) you disagree with, you wouldn't last a second in a party which has to face the ugly, no win choices of governing an entire country. You may be a Marxist but you're no Leninist. Or are you going to reply by stating that the CPB is so wrong that any effort spent within it is futile, so it's better to just sit on your armchair and privately form the most correct opinions? Do I even have to state how utterly defeatist and nihilistic this is?
Fuck it. I like leftypol but this general does wind me up sometimes with the glib nihilism that there is nothing a British Marxist can do. Join the YCL, join the CPB, you're not going to get your hands dirty with mortal sin, and every two years you can work against any lines which you disagree with - as is the responsibility of every ML in a party organised along the lines of DemCen.